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Thursday, December 29, 2005

Bloody Hell

So that was fun. If not completely unsurprising. You could tell in the first 3 minutes that Sauer was going to have to have a performance like MTU's goalie did if Michigan was going to have a shot in this game. They were all over us in the first period but Sauer was outstanding to keep it 0-0. Michigan was spending so much time keeping the puck out of their net that there wasn't a lot of time left over for offense.

Then Fragner, one of the walkon forwards, takes a stupid hitting from behind penalty (that was actually legit....of course by that token so were Sterling's and Sweatt's but neither of them got tossed) and they score with under a minute left in the first period. And in pure Sun Belt Conference fashion, the officials ejected Swystun instead of Fragner--which was later corrected even though Swystun had already taken off all his gear. No truth to the rumor that Lloyd Carr had to call timeout to get the call reversed. That goal really hurt. Then Dunlap has a bad giveaway in our end on a power play, suddenly it's 2-0 and the game's basically over.

The rest of the team responded by taking some stupid penalties leading to more CC goals (Bailey's hook and Hensick's slash were just stupid and they made us pay). Hunwick played a stupid hockey game, and if his brother is reading this he probably wants to kick my ass for yet again stating the obvious. With that many walkons and down that many forwards, you can't let a team like that get power plays and we kept putting them a man up.

I'd have a hard time blaming either goalie for what happened tonight, and I hope they go with Sauer tomorrow, because even though we played like hell, I think we're still probably good enough to beat Tech, as long as we don't let Chris Conner loose.

Like I said before, there's just no point in playing in that tournament. You can't play down 2 of our 3 best forwards and 3 of our best 4 defensemen and expect to win games.

MacVoy brought a lot of energy in the early going but then I didn't see a whole lot of him the rest of the game. He was out there hitting people and getting the crowd into it. I like that kid and I hope he gets more of a shot.

One thing I forgot about football: 31, 34, 28, 45, 30, 28, 38, 32. What are those numbers? The number of points we've given up in our bowl game since the national championship year. That's completely unacceptable and it means for 8 straight seasons, Jim Hermann's defense has been shredded despite having a month to prepare. Yes we won a few of those games, but that is faaar too many points to be giving up every time we face a top-notch (in most cases) team. Especially with that kind of time to prepare. It's not too much to ask to hold a team under 4 TDs is it?

Waters assured them he would take officiating complaints seriously and would file the required report, ESPN's Joe Schad reported. Waters said officiating in the Sunbelt was "pretty good" this year. A Sun Belt crew worked the Champs Sports Bowl this year with "no complaints," Waters said.

Good. There needs to be accountability when someone screws up their job that badly.

The lesson to be learned is this: Don't go to the freaking Alamo Bowl and you won't have to deal with Sun Belt conference officials. Hell, they're so inept they don't have the email address right for their Director of Football Officials on their homepage.

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